"Espia só esse meme!": a presença da identidade amazonense na linguagem multimodal dos memes

Abstract

This research has the general objective of evaluating how the multimodal genre ‘meme’, constituted by the regional variant of the state of Amazonas and by cultural singularities of the man from the North, signifies the Amazonian identity in the cyberspace of digital social networks. As for specific objectives, we sought to examine the characteristics of Amazonian language and culture in contemporary times, considering the changes established by the emergence and continuous use of digital social networks; analyze how the digital genre ‘meme’, when using Amazonian and particularities of local culture in its structure, portrays the identity of residents of the state of Amazonas; and investigate the way in which the Amazonian identity is signified based on the discourses and ideological positions that constitute the texts and the subject-readers. To this end, the following operational concepts were initially defined: studies by Nunes (2013) and Amoêdo (2021) are explored on digital social networks; on digital genres we have Marcuschi (2010), Rojo (2015) and Paiva (2018); for the concept of multimodality, the speech of Ribeiro (2016) and Alves (2020); the ‘meme’ concept is anchored in the studies of Dawkins (2007), Shifman (2014), Oliveira (2019) and Vazan (2020); finally ‘culture, identity and regional language’ are based on Bauman (2021), Thompson (2011), Freire (2020), Barroso, Bonete and Queiroz (2017). Furthermore, the research is located in the field of French Discourse Analysis (ADF), therefore, it is supported by the methods and studies developed by Pêcheux (2008), Orlandi (2015) and Freire (2021). In line with the ADF, qualitative (Paiva, 2019), interpretative/naturalistic (Paiva, 2019) and bibliographic research of primary and secondary sources (Lakatos; Marconi, 2018) were used as methodological procedures. In this sense, the corpus defined for analysis are twenty memes published between April 2021 and December 2022 on the digital social network ‘Instagram’ – published by the pages ‘Manaus Memes’, ‘Manaus na depression’ and ‘Telezé Manaus’ – and the respective comments made by users who contacted the chosen texts. Obtaining results that point to the presence of a ‘multiple identity/personality’ signified through discourses that integrate virtual spaces and make up the subjectivity of Amazonians.